Month: February 2022

It's been a while since I took a look at the latest COVID-19 numbers, so let's do that. The powers that be have decided that the best metric is no longer cases or deaths, but hospitalizations, so here are hospitalization rates in the US plus the five biggest Western European countries:

Everybody is way down from the early January peak and hospitalizations are still dropping. So things are looking pretty good.

As an added bonus, here's another chart showing each surge of COVID since the start of the pandemic:

The conventional wisdom at the beginning of the Omicron surge was that it would be severe but short. That's been more or less borne out in the US, where the peak was the highest ever but the curve goes up and down quite sharply. However, it's worth noting that (a) the Omicron surge wasn't way sharper than previous surges, and (b) other countries have had surges that were just as sharp as the US omicron surge.

I don't have anything to make of this aside from thinking that the sharpness of COVID surges varies quite a bit in different countries at different times. I'm not sure our Omicron surge was really anything out of the ordinary.

Charlie, like most cats, adores it when we change the bedsheets. He zooms around as we wave the sheets over his head and attacks anything that comes his way. In this photo he is just about to pounce on something, but I don't know what. Apparently I stopped taking pictures before he made his move.

After a dip in December, consumer spending is now back on track:

There's nothing much to say about this. It just adds to the mountain of evidence that the US economy has recovered from the pandemic and is now back on its pre-pandemic growth path. This is all thanks to the massive amounts of stimulus spending we engaged in, which is also responsible for our current bout of high inflation. I'd say the price was worth it, but I suppose reasonable minds may disagree.

Anyway, the real reason for posting this is to let you know that I'm alive and well. There's just not much to write about since the news is all Ukraine all the time. On that score, I've read several pieces that suggest the Russian army is having more trouble than it counted on, though it's still likely to overwhelm Ukraine by sheer force of numbers. After that, either Ukraine gives up or else Russia finds itself in a grinding forever war against insurgents who never quit. Time will tell.

After years of saying that someday I should go up to LA and check out their new subway, I finally did it this week. It's not so new anymore, but better late than never, amirite?

I was mainly interested in taking pictures of the various pieces of artwork that adorn some of the stations, and I'll show those to you in the future. First, though, here's my favorite bit of creative decoration. It's at the Hollywood/Highland station, and as you approach the escalator to the platform it looks like an ordinary railing:

However, once you descend to the platform itself and look up, it's a strip of 35mm film. Clever!

Quick note: I'm sure I'll have occasional comments on Russia's invasion of Ukraine over the next few days and weeks, but only if I have something interesting to say. Beyond that, I'm no Ukraine expert and won't be writing about it more generally. You can get that from dozens of regular news sources.

My basic take remains: Putin is a thug; Ukraine is more or less blameless in all this; Donald Trump should be ashamed of himself; ditto for much of the Republican Party and its poltroonish "Putin is only doing this because Biden is weak" crap; every Western country should toss out Russian nationals and restrict visitor visas to one week; Europe needs to get more serious about military power; this is the first major European war since WWII in which one country has invaded another with the intent of permanently taking its territory.

Russia under Putin is a pariah nation. Whatever else you can say about the US invasion of Iraq—and you can say plenty—it was never an attempt to annex territory permanently. This is. Russia needs to be isolated from the rest of the world as long as it pursues this kind of war.

A new poll from CBS News shows that "book banning" is pretty unpopular: a whopping 85% of the country thinks it's wrong to ban books for ideological or racial reasons—though I note that the pollsters didn't bother to ask about banning books due to sexual content or adult language.

Liberals are touting this as evidence that liberal opposition to book banning is a political winner for liberals, and maybe it is. But as with so many polls like this, salience is the big unknown. Do most people really care a lot about book banning? Or do they just vaguely dislike it? There's no way to know.

In any case, I found this far more fascinating:

A lot of people apparently think that racism is no big thing anymore. But put that aside for a moment. A full 29% believe that racism was never a big deal.

That's not just a difference of opinion, that's flat out insane. But what's the cause? Is it mostly due to people wildly underestimating the effect of racism? Or is it due to an almost unbelievable ignorance of US history? I would really, really love to see a deeper dive into this.

I don't know what kind of tree this is, but the red leaves were pretty so I took a picture of them. Anybody want to help ID this bit of Louisiana swamp flora?

Houston, we have a problem:

Disneyland’s Electrical Parade is ditching its patriotic float. Why that’s a good thing

The most notable change appears to be happening with the Main Street Electrical Parade, which is doing away with an America-first finale that had survived a number of decades and featured a closing stars-and-stripes float of the United States flag, followed by a larger-than-life eagle.

The new float will give the Main Street Electrical Parade an infusion of fresh film- and park-inspired intellectual property and strike Disneyland of one of its last remaining symbols of arguably stale patriotism.

....One of the most impactful ways to get to know one another is through the stories we have told over different eras — tales that can represent the full spectrum of the American population — rather than rose-tinted American flag-waving.

I expect Tucker to be all over this, followed by a full-court Fox News press along with expressions of outrage from the likes of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis, who will demand that Disney promise never to do this at Florida's Disney World.

And how will Disney respond to all this? Wait and see. Tick, tick, tick.

Tyler Cowen pointed today to a recent paper that says the US redistributes more to low income groups than any European country. But here's a chart from the paper:

We're close to the bottom! So what's up? The answer is taxes:

According to the authors, our tax system is more progressive than those in Europe. When you consider this as "redistribution" and add it to government benefits, the US looks very good on net:

The authors estimate that on average, net transfers to the bottom 50% in the US are higher than net transfers in Europe by roughly two percentage points of national income. That's well and good, but the problem is this:

As you can see, the pretax share of income of the bottom 50% is a meager 12% of national income in the US and around 18-20% in Europe. An extra two points in transfers barely makes a dent in overall income inequality. Europe remains a much fairer society than the US.

I'm a little skeptical of the tax stuff on two counts. First, although European countries rely heavily on VATs, which tend to be regressive, their income taxes are both high and progressive. So I'm surprised that virtually every country has a net regressive tax system. Second, when you account for state and local taxes, the US tax system is not all that super progressive. I'm surprised that we come out not just more progressive than every European country, but far more progressive.

In any case, if the conclusions of this paper are correct, we've learned two things:

• Via taxes and transfers, we give a little bit more to the bottom 50% than any country in Europe.
• Nonetheless, income inequality has grown so dramatically in the US that our higher level of transfers barely even registers. The bottom 50% has lost more than eight percentage points of national income since 1980, and an extra one or two points in lower taxes doesn't do much to fix that.

Vive la différence.

This is a busker on the Seal Beach pier with Long Beach harbor in the background. As it happens, though, she wasn't actually busking. She played her violin for a few minutes just to attract attention, and then put it away. Her real business was selling small paintings: portraits, elaborate letterforms, mythical animals, and so forth. The usual.